Homecomings (9 page)

I reminded her how many of her fears had turned out nonsense. I made some plans for us both after the war. Her body was not trembling by this time, and I gave her a tablet of her drug and stayed by her until she went off to sleep.

Next morning, although she was not anxiety-free, she discussed her state equably (using her domesticating formula – ‘about twenty per cent angst today’) and seemed a good deal restored. That evening she was strained, but she had a good night, and it was not for several days that she broke down again. Each night now, I had to be prepared to steady myself. Sometimes there were interludes, for as long as a week together, when she was in comfortable spirits, but I was tensed for the next sign of strain.

My work at the office was becoming more exacting; the Minister was using me for some talks face-to-face where one needed nothing else to think about and no tugs at the nerves; when I left Sheila in the morning, I wished that I were made so that I could forget her all through the day – but at some time, in the careful official conversation, a thought of her would swim between me and the man I was trying to persuade.

More than once, I found myself bitter with resentment against her. When we first married she had drained me of energy and nerve, and had spoiled my chance. Now, when I could least afford it, she was doing so again. That resentment seemed to exist simultaneously, almost to blend, with pity and protective love.

The first week in December, I was in the middle of a piece of business. One afternoon, about half past five, when I was counting on working for an hour or two more, the telephone rang. I heard Sheila’s voice, brittle and remote.

‘I’ve got a cold,’ she said.

She went on: ‘I suppose you couldn’t come home a bit early? I’ll make you some tea.’

It was abnormal for her to telephone me at all, much less ask me to see her. She was so unused to asking that she had to make those attempts at the commonplace.

I took it for granted that something more was wrong, abandoned my work, and took a taxi to Chelsea. There I found that, although she was wretched and her tic did not leave her mouth, she had nothing new to say. She had fetched me home just to work over the moving belt of anxiety – the bits and pieces came round and round before us – Robinson, January 1st, her ‘crack-up’. My impatience not quite suppressed, dully I said: ‘We’ve been over all this before.’

‘I know it,’ she said.

‘I’ve told you,’ I said mechanically, ‘worse things have passed, and so will this.’

‘Will it?’ She gave a smile, half-trusting, half-contemptuous, then broke out: ‘I’ve got no purpose. You’ve got a purpose. You can’t pretend you haven’t.’ She cried out: ‘I’ve said before, I’ve handed in my resignation.’

I was tired of it, unable to make the effort of reassurance, irked that she had dragged me from the work I wanted to do. With the self-absorption that had now become complete, she dismissed all my life except the fraction of it I spent supporting her. We were sitting by the fire in the drawing-room. I heard myself using words that, years before, I had used in her old sitting-room. For there, in my one attempt to part from her, I had said that our life together was becoming difficult for me. Now I was near repeating myself.

‘This is difficult for me,’ I said, ‘as well as for you.’

She stared at me. Whether or not the echo struck her, I did not know. Perhaps she was too drawn into herself to attend. Or perhaps she was certain that, after all that had happened, all that had changed, I could no longer even contemplate leaving her.

‘It is difficult for me,’ I said.

‘I suppose it is,’ she replied.

On that earlier occasion, I had been able to say that for my own sake I must go. But now, as we both knew, I could not. While she was there, I had to be there too. All I could say was: ‘Make it as easy for me as you can.’

She did not reply. For a long time she gazed at me with an expression I could not read. She said, in a hard and final tone: ‘You’ve done all you could.’

UP to 20 December there was no change that I noticed. As I lived through those days they seemed no more significant than others. Later, when I tried to remember each word she and I said, I remembered also the signs of distress she showed about January 1st, and the new job. She was still too proud to ask outright, but she was begging me to find an excuse to get her out of it.

Otherwise she had fits of activity, as capricious as they used to be. She put on a mackintosh, in weather that was already turning into bitter winter, walked all day along the river, down to the docks, past Greenwich, along the mud-flats. When she got home, flushed with the cold, she looked as she must have done as a girl, after a day’s hunting. She was cheerful that night, full of the enjoyment of her muscles; she shared a bottle of wine with me and fell asleep after dinner, a little drunk and happily tired. I did not believe in those flashes of cheerfulness, but also I did not totally believe in her distress. It did not seem, as I watched her, to have the full weight of her nature behind it.

Her moods fluctuated, not as my friend Roy Calvert’s did in cycles of depression, but in splinters from hour to hour; more exactly, her moods could change within a single moment, they were not integral; sometimes she spoke unlike an integral person. But that had always been so, though it was sharper now. She still made her gibes, and, the instant she did so, I felt the burden of worry evanesce. This phase was nothing out of the ordinary, I thought, and we should both come through it, much as we had done for the past years.

In fact, I behaved as I had seen others do in crises, acting as though the present state of things would endure for ever, and occasionally, as it were with my left hand and without recognizing it, showing a sense of danger.

One day I got away from my meetings and confided in Charles March, one of the closest friends of my young manhood, who was at this time a doctor in Pimlico. I told him, in sharper tones than I used to myself, that Sheila was in a state of acute anxiety, and I described it: was it any use bringing in another psychiatrist? The trouble was, as he knew, she had consulted one before, and given him up with ridicule. Charles promised to find someone, who would have to be as clever and as strong-willed as she was herself, whom she might just conceivably trust. But he shook his head. ‘I doubt if he’ll be able to do much for her. All he might do is take some of the responsibility off you.’

On 20 December, Charles rang me up at the office and gave me a doctor’s name and address. It happened to be the day I was bringing my first substantial piece of departmental business – the business from which Sheila had called me away a fortnight before – to an issue. In the morning I had three interviews, in the afternoon a committee. I got my way, I was elated, I wrote a minute to my superior. Then I telephoned the doctor whom Charles had recommended; he was not at his surgery and would not be available for a fortnight, but he could see my wife in the first week in January, 4 January. That I arranged, and, with a throb of premonition, my own work shelved for a day or two, free to attend to her, I telephoned home.

I felt an irrational relief when she answered. I asked: ‘How are you?’

‘Much the same.’

‘Nothing’s happened?’ I asked.

‘What could have happened?’

Her voice sharpened: ‘I should like to see you. When shall you be here?’

‘Nothing wrong since this morning?’

‘No, but I should like to see you.’

I knew her tone, I knew she was at her worst. I tried to coax her, as sometimes one does in the face of wretchedness, into saying that she was not so bad.

Flatly the words came to my ear: ‘I’m not too bad to cope.’

She added: ‘I want to see you. Shall you be long?’

When I went into the hall, she was waiting there for me.

She began to speak before I had taken my coat off, and I had to put my arm round her shoulders and lead her into the drawing-room. She was not crying, but I could feel beneath my hand the quiver of her fibres, the physical sign that frightened me most.

‘It’s been a bad day,’ she was saying. ‘I don’t know whether I can go on. It’s no use going on if it’s too hard.’

‘It won’t be too bad,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

I was ready with the automatic consolation.

‘Have I got to go on? Can I tell them I shan’t be able to come on January 1st?’

That was what she meant, I had assumed, by ‘going on’; she spoke like that, whenever she winced away from this ordeal to come, so trivial to anyone else.

‘I don’t think you ought,’ I said.

‘It wouldn’t matter much to them.’ It was as near pleading as she had come.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘if you get out of this, you’ll get out of everything else in the future, except just curling up into yourself, now won’t you? It’s better for you to come through this, even if it means a certain amount of hell. When you put it behind you, all will be well. But this time you mustn’t give up.’

I was speaking sternly. I believed what I said; if she surrendered over this test, she would relapse for good and all into her neurosis; I was hoping, by making my sympathy hard, to keep her out of it. But also I spoke so for a selfish reason. I wanted her to take this job so that she would be occupied and so at least partially off my hands. In secret, I looked forward to January as a period of emancipation.

I thought of mentioning the doctor whom Charles March had recommended, and the appointment that I had made. Then I decided against.

‘You ought to go through with it,’ I said.

‘I knew you’d say that.’ She gave me a smile, not bitter, not mechanical, quite transformed; for a second her face looked youthful, open, spiritual.

‘I’m sorry for giving you so much trouble,’ she said, with a curious simplicity. ‘I should have been luckier if I could have cracked up altogether, shouldn’t I?’ Her imagination had been caught by an acquaintance who had solved her problems by what they called a ‘nervous breakdown’, and now seemed happy and at peace. ‘I couldn’t pull that off somehow. But I ought to have been able to manage by myself without wearing you out so much.’

As I listened I was moved, but, still trying to stiffen her nerve, I did not smile or show her much affection.

That night we played a couple of games of chess, and were in bed early. She slept quietly and next morning got up to have breakfast with me, which was unusual. Across the table her face looked more ravaged and yet more youthful without its makeup. She did not refer to what had been said the evening before; instead, she was talking, with amusement that seemed light and genuine, about my arrangements for the coming night. Gilbert Cooke had invited me to dinner at his club; getting back to Chelsea, I said, in the blackout, having had a fair amount of drink, was not agreeable. Perhaps it would be better if I slept at my own club. How much should I have had to drink? Sheila wanted to know – with a spark of the inquisitiveness about male goings-on, the impudence that one saw sometimes in much younger women, high-spirited, not demure, but brought up in households without brothers.

On those light, teasing terms, we said goodbye. I kissed her and, in her dressing-gown, she came to the door as I went down the path. At the gate I waved, and standing with her arms by her sides, poised, erect and strong, she smiled. It was too far away to see her clearly, but I thought her expression was both friendly and jibing.

AT White’s that night, Gilbert Cooke and I had a convivial dinner. He had invited me for a specific reason and yet, despite his unselfconscious raids into other people’s business, he could not confess this bit of his own until I helped him out. Then he was loose and easy, a man with an embarrassing task behind him; he ordered another bottle of wine and began to talk more confidentially and imperiously.

The favour he asked would not have weighed so heavy on most men. It appeared that he had been trying all ways to get into uniform, but he kept being turned down because he had once had an operation for mastoid. Gilbert was ashamed and sorry. He wanted to fight, with a lack of pretence that men of our age had felt twenty-five years before; in 1939 the climate, the social pressures, had changed; most other men I met in Gilbert’s situation blessed their luck, but he felt deprived.

However, by this time, he had accepted his loss; since he could not fight, he wished to do something in the war. Stay with Paul Lufkin?

‘Why does he want me to?’ Gilbert Cooke inquired with his suspicious, knowing, hot-eyed glance.

‘Because you’re useful to him, of course.’

‘No, he’s thinking out something deeper than that. I’d give fifty quid to know just what.’

‘Why in God’s name should he not want you to stay?’

‘Haven’t you realized he thinks about all of us five moves ahead?’

Gilbert’s face was shining, as he filled his glass and pushed the bottle across. I did not realize what he wanted me to (which seemed to me conspiratorial nonsense), but instead I did realize another thing. Which was that Gilbert, despite his independent no-man air in Paul Lufkin’s company, was at heart more than normally impressionable: he gave Lufkin brusque advice, but in private thought he was a great man: so that Lufkin received the pleasures of not being flattered, and of being deeply flattered, at one and the same time.

But Gilbert, as well as being susceptible to personality, was a sincere and patriotic man. The country was at war and with Lufkin, although Gilbert was hypnotized by the human drama, he was not doing anything useful. So this lavish bachelor dinner, this elaborate wind-up, led to nothing but a humble question, which he was too diffident to do more than hint at.

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘that you’d like a job in a government department?’

‘If they’d possibly have me.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

‘Oh, I was never up to their clan as a brain, I don’t see why they should.’

In fact, able active men of thirty-five, with decent academic careers, permanently exempt from call-up, were bound soon to be at a premium. I told him so.